


By the Firelight (Lone Winchester Remix)

by embroiderama



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-20
Updated: 2010-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A hunt finds Sam during his time at Stanford.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the Firelight (Lone Winchester Remix)

**Author's Note:**

> This was remixed from [In the Light of Day](http://halfshellvenus.livejournal.com/85735.html) by [](http://halfshellvenus.livejournal.com/profile)[**halfshellvenus**](http://halfshellvenus.livejournal.com/), which is a beautiful story. Please go read it! Thank you to [](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/profile)[**elanurel**](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/) for the lovely beta.

During his first year at Stanford, Sam lived the life of an unarmed hunter--keeping his eyes on the dark, hidden corners as he walked around campus, avoiding the wild places where human traces were faint enough to let other things flourish.

By the time classes began in his second fall term, Sam found himself standing in the middle of a dark quad at night, looking around and thinking how ridiculous it was to be worried. Regular people, sane people who didn't go looking for monsters, almost never brushed up against the things that went bump in the night.

Sam felt his body loosen, his shoulders relaxing from the stiff attention-stance he'd unconsciously fallen into. He was normal, he'd chosen that. He didn't need to worry anymore.

The next weekend, he let his roommate Steve talk him into a hike down the canyon trail, and the most dangerous thing he encountered was a patch of loose gravel that left him on his ass with a scrape on the heel of his hand. There were families there, normal people.

It was safe.

Jess surprised him with her Christmas present -- plane tickets to go skiing in Colorado with her parents over winter break. The resort was small, less tame than he had imagined, but with Jess sparkling beside him in her silvery ski boots, the dark spaces between the trees could carry no threat. The snow was a treat, not a misery, and when she pulled her hands out of their mittens and slipped them underneath his jacket, his stomach muscles jumped at her heat pressing into his cold skin. His own wide smile reflected in the lenses of her sunglasses and, when he kissed her, she tasted like cocoa.

Spring semester of their third year, he and Steve decided to sign up for a class together. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ecosystems of the Bay Area sounded like a good way to knock out the core science requirement and balance out the heavy-reading classes that filled out the rest of his schedule. The labs were all to be completed outdoors and rolling research in with hiking and camping trips was a serious bonus.

For their midterm paper, they decided on a weekend trip to Big Basin State Park to photograph and document the kinds of materials used in local birds' nests. Jess and Steve's girlfriend Katie agreed to come along and keep them warm during the chilly spring nights, but the week before the trip Jess came down with a nasty chest cold that had her coughing hard enough to make tears stand out in her eyes. She slept through a couple days of classes, and by Saturday morning she was feeling better but far too worn out to hike around all day.

She trudged down to the dining hall to meet Sam for breakfast, and he pressed a kiss good-bye to her cool forehead. He'd be the third wheel with just Steve and Katie, but the project was due in a week; they couldn't put their trip off any longer.

The day was beautiful, clear blue sunlight filtering down through the trees. The exertion of the hike and the challenge of shimmying up trees to get pictures of some higher nests sent a rewarding heat echoing through his muscles, and the lunch of sandwiches they'd smuggled out of the dining hall tasted better for being eaten with logs for seats rather than plastic chairs. When the sky started to darken, they settled in at a campsite and started a small fire to heat up the packages of stew they'd brought.

Steve and Katie cuddled together on the far side of the fire, their conversation too quiet to be heard over the hiss and snap of burning wood. With stew and bread filling his stomach and cool smoky air in his lungs, Sam leaned back against a rock and let himself drift off to sleep.

When the scream woke him, he pushed upright and was on his feet before his eyes were clear enough to see Steve scrambling up alone from the double-size sleeping bad he shared with Katie.

The scream--Katie's scream--sounded again from the trees outside the clearing where they'd camped. Sam took off into the darkness, pulling the Maglite from his belt with his left hand and groping pointlessly toward his pocket with his right hand. His fingers itched to close around a weapon, and he ducked down to the ground just long enough to grab a solid branch that wasn't too unwieldy to carry. Sam's feet found easy placement on the uneven, leaf-strewn forest floor, even as he heard Steve struggling a hundred yards or more behind him.

The beam of Sam's flashlight glanced across the reflective trim of Katie's jacket, and he slammed to a stop, holding his breath. The creature that had her backed up against a tree, her hand bleeding from a bite, was the size of a mountain lion and similar in shape. But it wasn't a cat--it was a Snahlforg. He'd hunted one with his dad and Dean in Minnesota the summer between tenth and eleventh grades, but he'd never heard of them being anywhere near California.

Scandinavian monsters that had somehow hitched a ride with immigrants from northern Europe, Snahlforgs had a cry that sounded like the wails of a human child and could only be heard by women. They were afraid of fire, but they called from out in the darkness and lured their favorite kind of meal to come to them.

That hunt nearly four years before felt closer to Sam than anything from the last few years of classes and dorm rooms and dining halls. He shouted to get the Snahlforg's attention, blinding it with the flashlight beam and swinging out with the branch clutched tight in his hand. His aim was true, and the pointed end of the stick went straight into the creature's right eye. It screamed, sounding nothing like a child now, not like anything human, and Sam pulled the branch out with a wet friction that turned his stomach.

The Snahlforg pulled back on its haunches and leapt toward Sam, but Sam swung the branch out again and skewered its left eye. With a gurgling cry, the creature died, snapping the branch as it fell to the ground. Sam stumbled back, his hand spasming around the ragged-ended stick still in his hand, and stared at the thing he'd killed.

"What the fuck?"

Steve's voice startled Sam, and he turned around to see them huddled at the base of a tree, Steve's arms around Katie. Their eyes were wide with shock and disgust and not all of it was for the Snahlforg. Neither of them had ever killed anything larger than cockroach. Just for a moment, Sam was as much a monster to them as the creature lying on the ground with it's jagged teeth bared in its sagging jaw.

"Just a mountain lion," Sam answered, swallowing around the taste of adrenaline and bile at the back of his throat. "The park's web site said there were a few out here." He dropped the stick and walked over and crouched in front of his friends. "Are you okay, Katie?"

Katie stared at Sam and then jerked away and looked at the darkness around them. "I heard something out here, a little kid."

Sam took her hand and examined the wound, which was shallow and no longer bleeding. Snahlforg's didn't transmit anything in their bites; she would be okay. "You must have been dreaming. There's nobody camped near here."

They were all silent a moment and, when they couldn't hear anything else moving in the darkness, Katie nodded. "I guess." She stood up shakily with help from Sam and Steve and then turned to wrap her arms around Sam's waist. "I don't know how you did that but you saved my life."

"Just a lucky shot." He started to rub her back but then he remembered the creature's blood on his hand. "I'm glad you're okay."

"Really fuckin' lucky," Steve murmured then smacked Sam on the arm. "You've been holding out on us, haven't you? Some kind of fancy fencing class in high school or what?"

Sam faked a smile. "Something like that."

Back at the campsite, they tried to call the ranger station, but none of them could get a signal, and it was too dark to hike out for another few hours. The chill of shock hit Katie, and Steve crawled back in the sleeping bag with her while Sam built the fire up. The thought that circled through his mind as he watched Steve wrap his arms around Katie was, Thank God Jess didn't come.

She could have been hurt, lured out into the darkness like Katie, and she would have seen Sam, seen him with blood on his hands and death at his feet. She would have seen what he was, what he couldn't escape being. He couldn't imagine her still loving him the way she did, couldn't see how she would want him to touch her with hands that knew how take life.

Still, as the night lightened into early morning, Sam wished he didn't have to be alone. He'd never been by himself before in the aftermath of a hunt. There'd always been Dean--his arm slung around Sam's shoulder as they followed Dad, walking away from a job well done or his hands on Sam's skin, cleaning and bandaging wounds, carefully pressing into bruises looking for deeper damage. A few really bad times, it had been Sam's hands on Dean's too pale skin, trying to hold Dean's blood inside him until Dad could stitch him up. The back of the car then, his hand wrapped around Dean's as Dad drove them back home.

And the worst time had been Dean's limp hand tugged out of his and Dad's arms around him as Dean was taken away on a gurney. He'd had blood on his hands that night, too.

Even then he hadn't been alone, Dad's shoulder rubbing up against his as they sat in the crowded waiting room. Later, alone with Dean in his hospital room while Dad talked to the doctor, Sam let his hand rest on his unconscious brother's chest and hated the wild thing inside himself that couldn't just be happy with what he had.

A few months later, when he told Dean about the letter he got from Stanford, he saw the please in Dean's eyes, the please stay, but Sam knew he had to get away far enough to figure out who he could be on his own. Who he could be with Dean out of arm's length.

Sitting by that camp fire in Big Basin, Sam wrapped his arms around himself and knew that he would never be anybody other than Sam Winchester.


End file.
